Look, I was going to do it, alright? I had to go to class and left the edit page open. --[[User:Castriff|Jimmy C]] ([[User talk:Castriff|talk]]) 01:10, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

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:I've moved this discussion to your talk page so the conversation can more easily be viewed. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]] ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 17:00, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

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==Moved discussion==

==Moved discussion==

Hi, just to let you know that I move the thread you started to [[explain xkcd:Community portal/Admin requests]]. Cheers, --[[User:Waldir|Waldir]] ([[User talk:Waldir|talk]]) 10:33, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, just to let you know that I move the thread you started to [[explain xkcd:Community portal/Admin requests]]. Cheers, --[[User:Waldir|Waldir]] ([[User talk:Waldir|talk]]) 10:33, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

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Line 78:

== Deletion ==

== Deletion ==

−

I'm sure you only overlooked this because of being busy fighting huge amounts of spam, but there was actually some valid history behind [[explain xkcd:Community portal/Design]], which I just restored (I left the spam edits under the carpet, though). It's not a huge deal, and as you can see, it's easily reversible, but it's generally nice to preserve page histories for archival reasons. Also, please comment on my talk page on the thread Davidy22 started regarding captchas. Cheers, [[User:Waldir|Waldir]] ([[User talk:Waldir|talk]]) 17:50, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

+

I'm sure you only overlooked this because of being busy fighting huge amounts of spam, but there was actually some valid history behind [[explain xkcd:Community portal/Design]], which I just restored (I left the spam edits under the carpet, though). It's not a huge deal, and as you can see, it's easily reversible, but it's generally nice to preserve page histories for archival reasons. Also, please comment on [[explain xkcd:Community portal/Technical#We need more maintainers]] when you have the chance. Cheers, [[User:Waldir|Waldir]] ([[User talk:Waldir|talk]]) 17:50, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

+

+

:Oops, again. I don't know if it was a case of unfortunate blindness, or I was too far into spam fighting that I simply deleted it. Sorry about that. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]<span title="I'm an admin. I can help.">_a</span> ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 20:35, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

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== Patrolling ==

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+

Hi, Lcarsos. I think this might be useful for you since you're doing so much work on spam fighting: [[mw:Help:Patrolled edits]]. I asked Jeff to change the wiki configuration so that edits by "auto-confirmed" users will be automatically patrolled. This means the feature should be more useful from now on. Let me know if it helps. Cheers, [[User:Waldir|Waldir]] ([[User talk:Waldir|talk]]) 21:28, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

+

+

:Edits from logged in people are still showing as un-patrolled. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. There are several editors that have created accounts that I'm not quite ready to blanket state that every edit they make are perfectly good. I think that if we had more people that were patrolling pages and edits the feature would be more useful. But, since it's just me going through and occasionally remembering to mark a page as patrolled, it's not very useful as I can generally remember where I've perused through. I think if we got Davidy22 rights to patrol edits too, I think that would push it over the mark into useful territory. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]<span title="I'm an admin. I can help.">_a</span> ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 21:43, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

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+

::Jeff {{diff|20769&oldid{{=}}20467|just enabled}} the tweaks to the autopatrolling feature as I asked him to. I know we can't immediately trust every edit a recent user does, but I find that well-intentioned mistakes (which we all make btw) are much easier to fix, and overall less harmful than spam/vandalism. Right now the threshold for autopatrolling is at 3 days of age and 10 edits (both conditions have to be met). We can tweak that if we decide different values would work better, but I am assuming that spammers and otherwise malicious editors would be caught and blocked before that. I intend to use the following links to help weed out the bad stuff from the wiki:

::Of course, only edits from now on will apply the new parameters, so older edits by (non-admin) trusted editors still show as unpatrolled. But from now on it will probably make sifting the recent changes a little easier, since we can now filter out edits that we don't have to worry much about, leaving only new users and anonymous ones, the groups spammers/vandals are most likely to belong to.

+

::Also, I agree that Davidy22 could have patrolling rights by now. I am liberal about adminship, so I'd suggest we ask Jeff to "promote" him, as that would do it.

I don't think anonymous vandals should be blocked indefinitely. IPs are generally not static so we might end up preventing someone from doing a legitimate contribution, while the spammer will likely not use that particular IP for very long. I suggest changing all [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?wpTarget=&wpOptions=userblocks&limit=50&title=Special%3ABlockList IP blocks] to have a finite expiration date, say a week, or a month. What do you think? --[[User:Waldir|Waldir]] ([[User talk:Waldir|talk]]) 15:55, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

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:I don't think that would be a good idea. Our second great spam bout was caused by the 1 month block that SlashMe placed on the IPs of a foregone spam attack expired, and suddenly all those computers had access to edit the wiki again. In theory IPs are not static, but the home I live in right now has had the same IP address since I moved in, and that's even with hard resetting the modem about weekly as Comcast fails to bond their channels together, and I suspect most ISPs work that way.

+

+

:Maybe we could try an experiment where we let all the blocks expire and see what happens. ''But'', I ''do not'' want that to be anywhere near any holiday, or major event, or major xkcd comic post (see Click and Drag or Congress) as it would be nearly impossible to hand pick out the good from the spam.

+

+

:I do understand that theoretically, if this goes on eventually we'll have blocked the whole internet from editing the wiki. We need a better way to lock this down. A lot of the wikis I've looked at disallow editing from anonymous users (See the [https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page Valve Developer] wiki and the [http://kspwiki.nexisonline.net/wiki/Main_Page Kerbal Space Program] wiki, this would cut down on about half the spam, and then we need a better way to stop the bots from registering accounts, somehow both the VDC and KSP wiki don't have any spam activity (creation or clean-up) for the past few days, we're obviously doing something wrong, but I have no idea what. We may be more popular than the KSP wiki, but certainly we aren't more popular than Valve's own wiki. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]<span title="I'm an admin. I can help.">_a</span> ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 17:14, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Moved discussion

Ruby Importer

For discussion of the Ruby Import assistant. Please create subsections for each item.

Multi-file Generation

I assume that ./importer.rb 100{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9} would also work? Blaisepascal (talk) 02:08, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

I hadn't even thought of that. I'll try it and report back as soon as I get home after work. lcarsos (talk) 16:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

It'll work; it's not a Ruby thing, it's a Borne Shell thing. When the Borne Shell does wild-card expansion, it generates all alternatives enclosed in braces. So "echo 1{2,3,4,5}" is equivalent to "echo 12 13 14 15". I've been known to do things like echo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9} 100 to list all numbers between 1 and 100. Blaisepascal (talk) 16:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I just ssh'd into a linux box, and yes that will work. But I still prefer using seq 1 100, much easier to type. lcarsos (talk) 17:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Removing Erroneous Categories

It seems to me that if you are removing the same "erroneous" category from three comics that all refer to the same thing (like Wikipedia) that perhaps a bit more explanation needs to be made as to why the category is erroneous. Blaisepascal (talk) 21:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I was going through categories, and it looked like someone had started to tag any page that had a link to Wikpedia. I was putting a stop to it.

But now that you've elevated this to conscious level, it might be that 2 of the pages were tagged Wikipedia because the theme of the comic was Wikipedia. The first one that caught my eye, 548: Kindle, merely had the word Wikipedia, that one to me seems that it was incorrectly categorized. The other two, now that I think about it, would make sense if we're categorizing comics by theme. I'll go back, make restitution, and fix 739: Malamanteau and 214: The Problem with Wikipedia, and undo changes to the Wikipedia category. Thanks for keeping me honest.

LCARS

Okay, first, I'd like to thank you for showing this to me. I'm always interested to see anything Star Trek related. Always. There should never be a Trek-less day, for anyone, ever. But, now, you've opened a can of worms so now I get to do a little bit of ranting.

With a few exceptions, anything "official" that Paramount/CBS Paramount/CBS commissions to be made based on Star Trek is crap. This is one of those things. The interface, while reminiscent of, and is close enough to scare away the children, is a tragedy that shouldn't have the privilege of being able to call itself "official" or "LCARS". The color scheme is vomitous, every color that could have been put into the interface is there, as opposed to the restrained every-color-represents-a-function style that is shown in the show. About the one thing they got correct is the use of the LCARS font. Other than that, the font is too large in every instance. The font should be bottom-right aligned, and there should be a generous amount of padding except for the bottom-right corner. And, except for actual paragraph text, everything should be all-caps.

They also got the elbos (the bits that change from vertical UI to horizontal and vice versa) wrong. The curves aren't skewed like that. A quick look at the fan-made LCARS Standards website would have showed them the correct way to build an elbo. Or, *GASP* they could ask Michael Okuda to consult on the project.

Final UI complaint: What is that panel on the bottom doing? You mean that the people that made this app completely missed the idea of the LCARS UI and just have a panel at the bottom with skinned buttons that take you to the main sections of the app? Also, don't mix the butt-ended buttons with the fully rounded buttons. Just don't. Someone should have slapped you in art school for doing that.

From reviews of the app in iTunes, it looks like the app isn't even fully baked. The database isn't full, just has entries for the popular characters and ships. This should be a front end for Memory-Alpha, but you'd have to do some work to strip out all the wikia bs.

Finally, still iOS only? It's apparently been out for a year, and been updated once, in October, 2011. Was this a one-off, did CBS hire Random Company LLC to "Make a thing for the hip kids, with the iPads and the what-not" pay them to get the app out the door, kept them for a month to fix bugs and then fired them? Have we heard of Android? Is this the 90s when developers had to pick between developing for Windows 95 or Mac OS 8?

Why is this catastrophe $5? There's obviously no development work going on, CBS makes bank off of the DVDs and other crap merchandise they sell (why are there no officially licensed replica isolinear chips?). This is pure, simple corporate greed.

Sorry for the rant, I get angry when my favorite things are mistreated. lcarsos (talk) 17:05, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Double redirect

You're right. I knew there had been a reason I didn't do that for the first pile of comics I created. That's for reminding me. TheHYPO (talk) 21:37, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

To the human behind the curtain

Congrats on becoming Admin

Looks like my days of 700+ changes per month are a thing of the past! (What will I ever do with all the free time now? Edit, perhaps? ;-) -- IronyChef (talk) 06:32, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Grazie. I noticed Jeff do a little bit of work, and then go silent. So, I hoped that I could catch him with a tab still open pointing out our plight. It looks like it worked! Also, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't in part because you started that daily counter of edits on your user page. lcarsos_a (talk) 06:40, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Minor thing; do it too if you want to. When deleting spam pages, I "[omitted]" any link that appeared in the deletion comment, just so it doesn't even show up in the logs. -- IronyChef (talk) 06:50, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Looks like you registered your account just two days before I I went on a hiatus for a while, so I'm afraid we never got a chance to interact much. Although away from editing, I've been following the wiki activity through RSS, so I'm aware of the huge amount of work you've put in, which I appreciate. And of course, I take the opportunity to congratulate you on earning your admin "badge". Cheers! --Waldir (talk) 17:05, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I seem to have started contributing at the moment when everyone else went on hiatus. It got very quiet for a while, but it seems like it's coming back alive. lcarsos_a (talk) 18:28, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Category:Comic images

Hi Lcarsos. I noticed you categorized two images in Category:Comic images. I am actually using the ones that aren't categorized yet as a todo list of those which haven't been moved to the original filenames (lowercase). If you categorize more images, please make sure to also move them to the lowercase filename, and fix the redirect from the filename with only the first character uppercased. That is: there are typically 3 file pages for every comic: file_name.png, File_Name.png and File_name.png, with the first and third redirecting to the middle one, and the end result shoudl be the second and third redirecting to the first. I hope this isn't confusing :) --Waldir (talk) 18:30, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I saw that BPothier uncategorized those two, but when I looked at them I saw they were redirection pages, and when I checked a few other images I saw the category was on the images. I thought I would be helpful and put the category on the File page instead of undoing the change on the redirect page. Sorry to be a nuisance. lcarsos_a (talk) 18:36, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Not at all :) You acted in a perfectly reasonable way. In fact I missed the fact that you were actually moving a category from a redirect to the real image, which makes perfect sense. I am the one using the uncategorized files list as a personal todo list, in clear unorthodox fashion :P --Waldir (talk) 04:29, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Captchas

I believe there's an option to force all users of a certain group to take the captcha when editing. Could you change the captcha settings to force all anonymous users to pass one to edit? This is getting stupid. Davidy22(talk) 07:14, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

First off, this is a request for Waldir. I have no idea what I'm doing. Second, I've looked at the captcha pages in MediaWiki's manual, and it looks like I don't have the rights to do that, it would have to be someone who can edit the php files to change that over (*ahem* Jeff). Third, I've clicked on every link in Special:SpecialPages and I don't see anywhere that I can change that. I wish I could. Fourth, I am sick and tired of all this spam!!!!! lcarsos_a (talk) 08:12, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Deletion

I'm sure you only overlooked this because of being busy fighting huge amounts of spam, but there was actually some valid history behind explain xkcd:Community portal/Design, which I just restored (I left the spam edits under the carpet, though). It's not a huge deal, and as you can see, it's easily reversible, but it's generally nice to preserve page histories for archival reasons. Also, please comment on explain xkcd:Community portal/Technical#We need more maintainers when you have the chance. Cheers, Waldir (talk) 17:50, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Oops, again. I don't know if it was a case of unfortunate blindness, or I was too far into spam fighting that I simply deleted it. Sorry about that. lcarsos_a (talk) 20:35, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Patrolling

Hi, Lcarsos. I think this might be useful for you since you're doing so much work on spam fighting: mw:Help:Patrolled edits. I asked Jeff to change the wiki configuration so that edits by "auto-confirmed" users will be automatically patrolled. This means the feature should be more useful from now on. Let me know if it helps. Cheers, Waldir (talk) 21:28, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Edits from logged in people are still showing as un-patrolled. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. There are several editors that have created accounts that I'm not quite ready to blanket state that every edit they make are perfectly good. I think that if we had more people that were patrolling pages and edits the feature would be more useful. But, since it's just me going through and occasionally remembering to mark a page as patrolled, it's not very useful as I can generally remember where I've perused through. I think if we got Davidy22 rights to patrol edits too, I think that would push it over the mark into useful territory. lcarsos_a (talk) 21:43, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Jeff just enabled the tweaks to the autopatrolling feature as I asked him to. I know we can't immediately trust every edit a recent user does, but I find that well-intentioned mistakes (which we all make btw) are much easier to fix, and overall less harmful than spam/vandalism. Right now the threshold for autopatrolling is at 3 days of age and 10 edits (both conditions have to be met). We can tweak that if we decide different values would work better, but I am assuming that spammers and otherwise malicious editors would be caught and blocked before that. I intend to use the following links to help weed out the bad stuff from the wiki:

Of course, only edits from now on will apply the new parameters, so older edits by (non-admin) trusted editors still show as unpatrolled. But from now on it will probably make sifting the recent changes a little easier, since we can now filter out edits that we don't have to worry much about, leaving only new users and anonymous ones, the groups spammers/vandals are most likely to belong to.

Also, I agree that Davidy22 could have patrolling rights by now. I am liberal about adminship, so I'd suggest we ask Jeff to "promote" him, as that would do it.

Blocking IPs

I don't think anonymous vandals should be blocked indefinitely. IPs are generally not static so we might end up preventing someone from doing a legitimate contribution, while the spammer will likely not use that particular IP for very long. I suggest changing all IP blocks to have a finite expiration date, say a week, or a month. What do you think? --Waldir (talk) 15:55, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that would be a good idea. Our second great spam bout was caused by the 1 month block that SlashMe placed on the IPs of a foregone spam attack expired, and suddenly all those computers had access to edit the wiki again. In theory IPs are not static, but the home I live in right now has had the same IP address since I moved in, and that's even with hard resetting the modem about weekly as Comcast fails to bond their channels together, and I suspect most ISPs work that way.

Maybe we could try an experiment where we let all the blocks expire and see what happens. But, I do not want that to be anywhere near any holiday, or major event, or major xkcd comic post (see Click and Drag or Congress) as it would be nearly impossible to hand pick out the good from the spam.

I do understand that theoretically, if this goes on eventually we'll have blocked the whole internet from editing the wiki. We need a better way to lock this down. A lot of the wikis I've looked at disallow editing from anonymous users (See the Valve Developer wiki and the Kerbal Space Program wiki, this would cut down on about half the spam, and then we need a better way to stop the bots from registering accounts, somehow both the VDC and KSP wiki don't have any spam activity (creation or clean-up) for the past few days, we're obviously doing something wrong, but I have no idea what. We may be more popular than the KSP wiki, but certainly we aren't more popular than Valve's own wiki. lcarsos_a (talk) 17:14, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Tools

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